Meta

Promotion

If WordPress.com hosts your site, you can tap one more set of useful statistics. Takea look in the Comments box to see which of your visitors left the greatest numberof comments and which posts stirred the most conversation.

The most interesting information is the top commenters. These people are particularlyvaluable, because their input can start discussions and keep the conversation going.Once you identify your top commenters in the past week or month, you can try tostrengthen your (and therefore your site’s) relationship with them. Make an extraeffort to reply to their comments and questions, and consider making a visit to theirblog, and commenting on their posts. If they stick around, you might even offer themthe chance to write a guest post for your site, or to become a contributor.

In any given minute, Google handles well over a million search queries. If you’relucky, a tiny slice of those searchers will end up at your site.Webmasters pay special attention to visitors who arrive through search engines.Usually, these are new people who haven’t read your content before, which makesthem exactly the sort of people you need to attract. But it’s not enough to know thatvisitors arrive through a search engine. You need to understand what brought themto your site, and to understand that, you need to know what they were searching for.The Search Engine Terms box can help you find out (Figure 12-25). It lists the topqueries that led visitors to your site for a single day (or, if you click Summaries, overa longer period of time).

If you use SEO to find what you think are the best keywords for tags, titles, anddescriptions (see, for example, page 443), the Search Engine Terms box helps youdetermine if your efforts are paying off. And even if you don’t, it gives you insightinto hot topics that attract new readers—and which you might want to focus on inthe future.

There are three ways a visitor can arrive at your site:• By typing your address into his browser (or by using a bookmark, which is thesame thing).• By following a link from another site that points to you.• By performing a search and following a link in the search results page.The first type of visitor already knows about you. There’s not much you can do toimprove on that.The second and third types of visitor are more difficult to predict. You need to trackthem so you can optimize your web promotion strategies. In this section, you focuson the second type of guest. These people arrive at your site from another website,otherwise known as a referrer.If you followed the link-building strategies laid out on page 440, the social sharingtips from page 414, and the publicizing techniques described on page 427, you’vecreated many different routes that a reader can take to get to your site. But whichare heavily traveled and which are overgrown and abandoned? To find out, you needto check the Referrers box, which ranks the sites where people come from, in orderof most to least popular.

Once you know your top referrers, you can adjust your promotional strategies. Forexample, you may want to stop spending time and effort promoting your site in placesthat don’t generate traffic. Similarly, you might want to spend more effort cultivatingyour top referrers to ensure you keep a steady stream of visitors coming to your site.

If you know what you’re doing right, you can do a lot more of it. For example, ifyou write a blog with scathing political commentary, and your readers flock to anyarticle that mentions gun control, you might want to continue exploring the issue infuture posts. (Or, to put it less charitably, you might decide to milk the topic for allthe pageviews you can get before your readers get bored.)To make decisions like that, you need to know what content gets the most attention.A Facebook Like button (page 419), a WordPress.com Like button (page 421), orPolldaddy ratings (page 423) may help you spot popular posts, but a more thoroughway to measure success is to look at your traffic. On the Stats page, focus on theTop Posts & Pages box, which shows you the most read posts and pages over thepast couple of days.

The Top Posts & Pages box gives you a snapshot of the current activity on your site,but to make real conclusions about what content stirs your readers’ hearts, youneed to take a long-term perspective. To do that, click the Summaries link. NowWordPress lets you compare your top pages over the past week, month, quarter,year, or all time. Just keep in mind that bigger timeframes are often biased towardolder articles, because they’ve been around the longest.If you analyze a site on WordPress.com, you can also check out the Tags & Categoriessection. It shows you the categories and tags that draw the most interest. You canform two conclusions from this box: Popular categories may reflect content yourreaders want to keep reading, and popular tags may indicate keywords that alignwith popular search terms.

Once you have some solid promotion tactics in place, you need to evaluate how wellthey perform. There’s no point in pursuing a failed strategy for months, when youshould be investing more effort in a technique that actually works. The best wayto assess your site’s performance, and see how it changes over time, is to collectwebsite statistics.There are a number of popular statistics packages that work with WordPress, anda range of plug-ins that automatically add tracking code to your site. In this section,you’ll focus on WordPress’s own statistics-collection service, which it offersto all WordPress.com sites and which is available to self-hosted sites through theJetpack plug-in.

Viewing Your Statistics

The best place to view your site statistics is on the WordPress.com home page. Goto http://wordpress.com, log in, and click the Stats tab. If you have more than onesite, you need to pick from the drop-down list in the top-right corner (Figure 12-22).

NOTE Jetpack users can see the same statistics by choosing Jetpack→Site Stats in the dashboard. However,WordPress encourages everyone to view statistics on the WordPress.com home page, and it may remove thestatistics link from the dashboard in the future.

The obvious question is now that you have all this raw data, what can you do withit? Ideally, you’ll use site statistics to focus on your strengths, improve your site, andkeep your visitors happy. You should resist the temptation to use it as a source ofendlessly fascinating trivia. If you spend the afternoon counting how many visitorshit your site from Bulgaria, you’re wasting time that could be better spent writingbrilliant content.

If you run a self-hosted site, you can make it even more attractive to Google andother search engines by using an SEO plug-in. But be warned, most SEO plug-insare an extreme case of overkill for the casual WordPress site-builder. Prepare to beswamped by pages of options and search settings.If you search WordPress’s plug-in repository for “SEO,” you discover quite a fewpopular plug-ins. One of the best is WordPress SEO by Yoast (http://tinyurl.com/seo-yoast). Its creator is WordPress über-guru Joost de Valk, who also blogs someuseful (but somewhat technical) SEO articles at http://yoast.com/cat/seo.Once you install and activate WordPress SEO, you see a new SEO menu in yourdashboard, packed with a dizzying array of options. You can ignore most of them,unless you want to change the way the plug-in works. The following sections explaintwo useful features you can tap into right away.

CREATING AN XML SITEMAP

After installing the SEO plug-in, your site gets one immediate benefit: an XMLsitemap. This is a document that tells Google where your content resides on yoursite. It ensures that all your posts get indexed, even if your home page doesn’t linkto them. Although you don’t need to give your XML sitemap another thought, youcan take a look at it by choosing SEO→XML Sitemaps and then clicking the XMLSitemap button. Needless to say, WordPress SEO updates your sitemap every timeyou publish a new post or page.NOTE The XML sitemap feature works only if you use descriptive permalinks that include post names (asexplained on page 116). If you use the stock ID-based permalinks, the plug-in won’t create an XML sitemap.

TWEAKING TITLES AND DESCRIPTIONS

The WordPress SEO plug-in also gives you control over two important details: thetitle and description (known to web nerds as the meta description) of each post orpage. These details are useful—even to SEO newbies—because Google displays themwhen it lists a page from your site in its search results. Figure 12-19 shows an example.

The title and description are also important because Google gives more weight tokeywords in those places than keywords in your content. In other words, if someonesearches for “dog breeding” and you have those words in your title, you can beatan equally ranked page that doesn’t.Ordinarily, the WordPress SEO plug-in creates a good title for a post, based on atitle-generating formula in the SEO→Titles & Metas section. This formula puts yourpost name first, followed by your site name, like this for the “crystal jasmine” post:Crystal Jasmine Named Tea of the Year – Magic Tea HouseHowever, you can customize the title before you publish the post using the Word-Press SEO by Yoast box, which appears on the Add New Post page (Figure 12-20).For example, it’s a good idea to shorten overly long post titles, and to replace cutesytitles with ones that clearly describe your content. You can also use the WordPressSEO box to type in a meta description.

The WordPress SEO by Yoast box also lets you run a pretend Google search so youcan see how your newly chosen title and description work. To do that, type the searchkeyword you want to test in the Focus Keyword box. Figure 12-21 shows an example.TIP For even more ways to optimize your site for search engines using the WordPress SEO by Yoast plug-in,check out the detailed tutorial at http://tinyurl.com/seo-yoast2.

The cornerstone of search-engine ranking is links—the morepeople connect to you, the greater your web prestige and themore trustworthy your site seems to Google. Here are sometips any WordPresser can use to build up her links:• Look for sites that are receptive to your content. To getmore links, you need to reach out and interact with otherwebsites. Offer to guest-blog on a like-minded site, join acommunity group, or sign up with free website directoriesthat include your type of business. Or, if your site has abroader reach, search for your topic in Google Blogsearch(http://blogsearch.google.com) to find similar sites.• Keep sharing. The social sharing techniques you learnedabout in the first part of this chapter are doubly importantfor PageRank. Although tweets and Likes aren’t aspowerful as website links, Google still counts them in yourfavor when respected people talk about your content onsocial media sites.• Add off-site links (that point to you). You don’t need towait for other people to notice your content. It’s perfectlyacceptable to post a good comment on someone else’sblog, with a link that references something you wrote.Or post in a forum, making sure your signature includesyour name and a link to your site. The trick is to find sitesand forums that share the same interests as your site. Forexample, if you’re an artisanal cheese maker in Chicago,it makes sense to chat with people running organic foodcooperatives. But be careful. There’s a thin line betweenspreading the word about your fantastic content andspamming other people. So don’t post on a forum orsomeone else’s site unless you can say something trulyinsightful or genuinely helpful. If you’re not sure whetherto post, ask yourself this question: “If this were my site,would I appreciate this comment?”• Research your competitors’ links. If you find out whereother people are getting their links from, you may be ableto get links from the same sites. Google has a nifty featurethat can help, called link. To try it out, go to the Googlesearch page and type in a full website address, with link:in front of it. Google will then find other pages that lead tothe web address you asked about. For example, searchingfor link:www.magicteahouse.net shows you all the sitesthat link to the home page on http://www.magicteahouse.net.